Power intoxication

Central Land Council director David Ross, speaking to The Centralian Advocate on April 23 slammed Noel Pearson’s boycott of the 2020 Summit. The Centralian Advocate noted that Mr Pearson did not turn up to the summit on Sunday, after criticising Saturday's sessions for failing to generate new ideas.

But Mr Ross said:

Even though the views were nothing new, you have to fix the past to move forward. … Noel Pearson got the salts because we weren't coming up with anything new. He basically dictates through his column in The Australian what he wants in his own view.

You put him with other Aboriginal people and he has difficulty dealing with different views.

Indigenous lawyer Megan Davis was also critical of Noel Pearson in her Sydney Morning Herald perspective piece on April 24:

For some, the writing was on the wall when Noel Pearson appeared to sleep through much of Saturday's session and was animated only when Kevin Rudd was in the room. Pearson then failed to turn up on Sunday, showing great disrespect to the others in the stream and wasting a place at the summit table that many others would have been honoured to take.

The Government must break the spell cast by Pearson and his colleagues. It would be a grave error to ignore the extraordinary goodwill and strong consensus generated in the Indigenous stream at the summit in favour of vocal but marginal sectional interests that the Government appears to believe are more palatable to the wider population.

On April 29 Wesley Aird continued to air dirty linen on prominent pages of The Australian when he asserted that "We need to stop people getting pissed and beating each other up. How is that going to happen in Canberra?". "If I was sleeping in the park tonight or in a party house in Aurukun or Yuendumu, I couldn't give a stuff (about a new body)."

Personally I thought the 2020 Forum was a success in bringing a diverse group of Indigenous leaders together and the big ticket items in the main were a positive outcome. The issues raised by disgruntled leaders, some who weren’t even there, of addressing chronic social issues, missed the point. Those issues have been identified and are currently being funded - this forum was about big ticket items.

In that respect the Treaty - or constitutional changes - was designed to offer protection to Indigenous Australians against the government in instances where they use Race Laws (exclusion of the 1975 Race Discrimination Act in the Northern Territory Intervention) to the detriment of Indigenous peoples.

One thing that is patently clear to me after witnessing events unfold at the 2020 Forum and the debate that raged between media savvy Indigenous leaders who continue to spitefully attack one since then is the urgent need to reinstate a national representative body.

Until we have a representative body, with a mandate from Indigenous voters to speak on our behalf, the government will continue to laugh at our fractured unelected leadership as viewed farcically in the national media - and play wedge politics at their convenience.

As Indira Gandhi once said, “… leadership at one time meant muscles; but today it means getting along with people,” and to that end I believe the new representative body, when elected, will resemble nothing of the old ATSIC where muscle appeared to have prevailed.